Goddess Love Help: How To Enforce Personal Boundaries

Enforcing personal boundaries has nothing to do with threats or ultimatums.

Women will often send me emails because they are confused about personal boundaries. Most women know what they want and don't want, including what they won't tolerate in a relationship. However, many women go against these desires and needs in order to keep a man. This is where self-esteem begins to plummet and drama rules the day.

He Is His Own Person

You cannot make a man do anything. You can't shame him into becoming what you need him to be for you by criticizing him, crying to him, begging him or stonewalling him. He may feel inspired by your behavior and his love for you to become a better man for you (like how an alcoholic might get sober for his children) but this isn't something you can initiate. It has to come from him.

When you treatpersonal boundaries like warnings or intimidations you are missing the point of having them. Personal boundaries are not meant to change him or control him. They are meant to solely help you.

I like to think of personal boundaries as more of a mindset and a mental choice than of an actual thing that I will not tolerate in my life. What I mean by this is that I think of personal boundaries more as things I won't let myself get upset over instead of things I won't accept being done to me.

Focusing on them this way helps me to arrive at the place where I naturally avoid painful relationships and interpersonal drama. If I make boundaries about what I won't tolerate but then do anyway, I get down on myself.

An Example:

If I have a personal boundary surrounding being yelled at and my boyfriend yells at me, I'm not going to stick around in that conversation lecturing him about how I won't tolerate yelling. I also won't leave the room and punish him for days with the silent treatment.

The way that I enforce personal boundaries is about how I choose to feel inside about being yelled at, not about how I react to him about his bad behavior.

The best way to not allow yelling to affect me is to unplug from the issue. Instead of getting angry and allowing myself to feel wounded and disrespected, I simply state how his yelling made me feel: "I feel ashamed and angry when I'm yelled at and I don't want to be yelled at anymore." I then find a way to stop investing any more feelings and energy into the fact that I was just yelled at. I stop allowing myself to be controlled by the yelling. I don't worry about making sure he heard me, I just state my feelings to him so that he is aware and has the opportunity to fix my feelings; however, if he continues to make me feel worse, and then I do what I have to do to stop investing an ounce of attention to the pain his yelling has caused.